“I hate the way they
portray us in the media. You see a black family and they say we are
looting, you see a white family and they say they are looking for food.
And, you know, it’s been five days because most of the people ARE black
... We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war
right now, fighting another way. And now they’ve given them permission to
go down and shoot us. George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

-- Kanye West,
speaking to a nationally televised audience on NBC

“We've
never seen anything like this before.” I have heard this phrase repeated
several times by newscasters describing the devastation wrought by
Hurricane Katrina. However, as I watched the footage of all those black
bodies desperately trudging through dirty floodwaters, I realized that I
actually had seen something exactly like this before. It was one year ago,
when Hurricane Jeanne slammed against the coasts of Haiti, a country
which, like New Orleans, is both poor and black. The floods and mudslides
ended up killing thousands of Haitians. The media gave scant attention to
the matter for a few days; just long enough to get some sexy footage of
houses being destroyed and valleys filled with floodwater. Enough to boost
ratings for a while. Shortly after that, they packed up their equipment
and got out of there faster than you can say “racist indifference.”

The United States
rendered so little aid as to be insignificant, and before long the entire
incident had faded from the minds of most Americans. There were few cries
of outrage over the fact that this country couldn't care less about the
deaths of thousands of black people, but devotes countless hours of TV
time to the latest Missing Pretty White Girl (I believe at the time it was
Dru Sjodin, not Natalie Holloway). But people dying in Haiti is one
thing. Americans have always found it easy to dismiss the deaths of those
from other countries, especially when those countries are full of
dark-skinned people. But who would think our government would allow
something equally devastating to happen to people on our own soil -- to
people who are full-fledged American citizens (in theory, anyway)?

Enter Kanye West.
The future of hip-hop. An artist who more than compensates for his
less-than-stellar skills as an emcee with his razor-sharp wit and passion
for justice and equality, not to mention his bravado. It's hard to imagine
any rapper since Tupac Shakur having the guts to get brolic with the
Commander-in-Chief on national TV. He will undoubtedly be savaged by
detractors on the right and the left for “politicizing” a fundraiser to
aid the victims of the flooding. However, I have little doubt that Kanye
was saying exactly what most of the black residents of New Orleans are
thinking right at this moment. As Kanye said on his last album, “Racism's
still alive, they've just been concealin’ it,” but it's in times of crisis
such as this one that America begins to show its true colors, and “black”
isn't one of them.

The truth is, Kanye
West didn't “politicize” a damn thing. George W. Bush did. The hurricane
became a political issue the second Bush decided there were more important
priorities than shoring up the preventive measures in New Orleans; such as
giving tax cuts to billionaires and launching an evil, imperialist war
against the people of Iraq. Hurricane Ivan made it abundantly clear that
New Orleans was unprepared to deal with such a catastrophe if one were to
occur. If only Bush could be half the statesman Fidel Castro is. The Cuban
government managed to evacuate over a million people, and didn't lose a
single life to Hurricane Ivan.

In fact, I'd say
Kanye was far too generous. Bush, as well as some of the other players in
this affair, don't simply “not care about” black people. They have been
proactive oppressors of African Americans for years. As Texas governor,
Bush never met a death certificate he didn't like. As a result, he is
personally responsible for the executions of numerous black men.
Mississippi's Governor Haley Barbour warned that all “looters” would be
dealt with “ruthlessly”. This is a man who has been linked to the Council
of Conservative Citizens, a group started from the White Citizen's
Councils of the civil rights era. These were groups committed to the
preservation of Jim Crow and had intimate connections and overlapping
membership with the Ku Klux Klan. And the New Orleans Police Department
doesn't need a “shoot to kill” order from the governor to go about
attacking black folks. New Orleans consistently ranks among the top cities
in the number of citizen complaints of police brutality. Just last month,
a black man named Raymond Robair died after the police brought him to the
hospital. Witnesses observed the cops brutally beating him, leaving him
with four broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.

But don't expect the
mainstream media to tell you anything negative about the New Orleans
Police Department. Their time will likely be devoted to unsubstantiated
stories that play into popular white fears about blacks -- stories about
wild, black savages engaging in theft, murder, rape, and even cannibalism.
White folks will eat it up like candy, and the ratings will soar
accordingly. In a time when we are being bombarded by so many images and
statements which seem designed to bring out the worst in us, it's very
refreshing to see someone like Kanye West step up and call a spade a
spade. Let's make sure he still has a career to go back to after the dust
settles. First and foremost we should donate money to the relief efforts,
but it would also be a good idea to cop Kanye's new album, Late
Registration. It's a classic.